3 Tips to Move More While You Work at Home

As many of you have fully transitioned to a work/live situation for the time being, I’m going to assume that you have the ‘Holy Trinity’ taken care of.

A place to sequester (hide) for virtual meetings or virtual work Happy Hours.

A defined workspace, a square of real estate on the kitchen table, home office or your kid’s bedroom.

Technology and the necessary tools to conduct business.

Check. Check. And Check.

Now that you have that covered, let’s figure out how to get you moving more during your work day, because that’s where you can truly shine in your profession.

A study in 2014 by scientists at Stanford University “…showed that walking significantly improves certain types of cognitive efforts involved in creativity, specifically convergent thinking, such as the ability to come up with solutions to a problem, and divergent thinking, which involves conceiving open-ended, original ideas.”

Here are some tips on how to get those creative juices flowing and problem-solving centers activated!

Take Your Meetings on the Go

Take advantage of being virtual on your Monday morning meetings or sales calls to walk around your house, home office or even get outside and toodle around the block. (Just be sure to read the meeting agenda first. I was on a staff meeting and decided to take a stroll. About 5 minutes in to the call we were instructed to open the doc that was sent and to start working on it. It required a quick U-turn back to my house!)

Schedule Walk Breaks

Set your alarm to go off every 45 to 90 minutes during your work day. These are your work blocks. Shut off your notifications, close any social media app and dig in to the work at hand. When your alarm goes off, take 5 to 15 minutes to stretch, walk around, or go outside for fresh air. Then get back to work. If your alarm goes off and you’re on a call or a virtual meeting at the minimum stand up and walk around the room. Unless you’re presenting, that would be awkward.

Stand Up

Standing periodically during your work hours is very beneficial. It requires more energy (calories) to hold your body upright and it also helps to eliminate the tightening and shortening of your muscles. It’s important that you stand with your weight equally distributed between your feet and alternate between sitting and standing.

To create your own standing desk place a storage container on your desk or table and raise your monitor or laptop to eye level. For proper ergonomics with a laptop, plug in an external keyboard and keep that on the lower level of your table. It works like a charm!

We won’t be working from home forever but until we get the all-clear, let’s try and be as healthy in our home offices as we can be. And when we do go back, you can take these tips with you.